First a quick thank you to Crown Cap for his excellent pictorial bottling guide!
Here we go:
All the bottled have been sat around in a garage for ten months plus, so I started with a good rinse out to clear the (literal) cobwebs out.
Followed up with a twenty minute soak in bleach solution to sanitise...
...only to be plagued by a leaky seal on my bottling bucket. A quick transfer to another bucket and a tighten sorted that out.
Forty bottles sanitising happily.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 80g of granulated sugar in 150ml of boiling water. Whack it in the microwave until bubbling nicely and then cling-film and leave.
A quick measure of FG and a swift tester. Finished at 1.006 giving a nice 4.5% and tasted lovely given its raw state.
No bottle tree here, so on with the manual rinsing and draining, followed up with a sodium metabisulphate dunk to get rid of the bleach.
Twenty bottles down.
Ready to cap.
My only miscap out of thirty-eight pint bottles, plenty of spares to replace any mistakes.
Thirty-eight brown bottles... in the kitchen to condition for a week prior to hiding in the garage.
00:22 now, hmm... definitely going to invest in some no-rinse sanitiser and a bottle-tree for next time.
